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http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
Real World Haskell, the book that everybody in the Haskell community has
been talking about for months, is finally entering the final stages of
production.
This is Haskell's "One Ring to Rule Them All" master tutorial book. It's
written by the luminaries of the scene, and it's goal is supposedly to
show you how to "solve real-world problems using Haskell". (Apparently
many people still think that Haskell is an academian's language that has
no place in the "real world".)
The full source text of the book is viewable from the link above. I
haven't read it yet, but I'm curios to see if it really succeeds in its
ambitious goals. I personally think Haskell is a fantastic language, but
I'm really not sure it's "ready" for the real world yet. It's still
rather lacking in libraries and documentation...
If you have a lifetime or two to spare, maybe you could have a read
though the opening pages and laugh.
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Invisible wrote:
> http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
Hmm. The introduction seems to promise things that don't actually work
for me. Chapter 1 seems nice, but Chapter 2... is... an entire chapter
on the type system.
Now *I* understand why this is so. But a Haskell newbie? They're
probably not going to understand. In normal programming languages, a
"type" is just a name for a particular data structure. You have integer,
floating point, character, string, boolean, and then various kinds of
containers and probably something like a Pascal "record". What's the big
deal?
Of course, Haskell's type system can do amazing things. In Haskell,
changing a type signature can completely transform the way your program
works. It can also wildly affect the efficiency of the code. It can help
you automatically construct a test suite. And so forth. You can even
*write programs* as type signatures!!
But none of this is obvious to a Haskell newbie. People used to normal
languages won't understand what all the fuss is about - and will
probably just skip the whole chapter...
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Hmm. The introduction seems to promise things that don't actually work
> for me. Chapter 1 seems nice, but Chapter 2... is... an entire chapter
> on the type system.
> Now *I* understand why this is so. But a Haskell newbie? They're
> probably not going to understand.
There are basically two ways of writing this type of book, depending on
your target audience: Either make it a tutorial-style self-study book for
people who haven't used that language before, or assume your target
audience mostly consists of computing scientists. In the latter case the
book is more an academic paper than a self-study book.
Of course you can try to go the mid-ground and try to appeal to both
target audiences at the same time, but that's a very hard genre to pull
out successfully. It's very easy to make the book just a bit too academic
for laymen to understand, and just a bit too mundane to keep the scientists
interested. In other words, it's difficult to raise interest in both target
audiences at the same time, without alienating at least one of them.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> There are basically two ways of writing this type of book, depending on
> your target audience: Either make it a tutorial-style self-study book for
> people who haven't used that language before, or assume your target
> audience mostly consists of computing scientists. In the latter case the
> book is more an academic paper than a self-study book.
Agreed.
However, the title "Real World Haskell" seems to suggest that the target
audience is supposed to be the first group, not the second group.
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Warp wrote:
> Of course you can try to go the mid-ground and try to appeal to both
It's not just computer scientists that do this either. Both Wolfram's
tome and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel are books
I've read that try to be a doctoral dissertation aimed at the layman and
missing both audiences.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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IMO, one of the hardest things about teaching Haskell is figuring out
which order to explain things in. The "things" are all very simple, but
each "thing" is related to half a dozen other "things" in such a way
that it's very awkward to figure out exactly where to start.
Chapter 1 began well, but Chapter 2 seems to be getting a bit lost. They
give an example of how to use if/then/else, but it's a recursive
example, so then they start on this tangent explaining about recursion,
but in the middle they throw in strict vs lazy evaluation orders and
start talking about thunks... woah, woah! Slow down there! One concept
at a time, people. o_O
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> However, the title "Real World Haskell" seems to suggest that the target
> audience is supposed to be the first group, not the second group.
Academic people are real-world people who make real-word applications
too, you know... :P
--
- Warp
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Warp escreveu:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> However, the title "Real World Haskell" seems to suggest that the target
>> audience is supposed to be the first group, not the second group.
>
> Academic people are real-world people who make real-word applications
> too, you know... :P
Yeah, and they have feelings, you insensitive clod! :P
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Invisible escreveu:
> Chapter 1 began well, but Chapter 2 seems to be getting a bit lost. They
> give an example of how to use if/then/else, but it's a recursive
> example, so then they start on this tangent explaining about recursion,
> but in the middle they throw in strict vs lazy evaluation orders and
> start talking about thunks... woah, woah! Slow down there! One concept
> at a time, people. o_O
Whoa, seem things didn't improve since "A gentle introduction to
Haskell". Someone said: "gentle as a heavy metal concert"... :D
OTOH, how can you possibly tell people about benefits of a functional
language without mentioning recursion and tail-recursion? How to tell
what's so great about Haskell's type system without showing what it's
all about?
They could just give short code examples of how to achieve practical
stuff, but how would they explaing the code without some theoretical
background about such issues and differences to imperative programming
with outdated type systems?
It's not easy at all to try and write such book...
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nemesis wrote:
> Whoa, seem things didn't improve since "A gentle introduction to
> Haskell". Someone said: "gentle as a heavy metal concert"... :D
http://arcanux.org/lambdacats/gentle-intro.jpg
> OTOH, how can you possibly tell people about benefits of a functional
> language without mentioning recursion and tail-recursion? How to tell
> what's so great about Haskell's type system without showing what it's
> all about?
>
> They could just give short code examples of how to achieve practical
> stuff, but how would they explaing the code without some theoretical
> background about such issues and differences to imperative programming
> with outdated type systems?
>
> It's not easy at all to try and write such book...
Indeed. I've sat down to write a tutorial myself several times. It
always seems to degenerate into "oh, wait, I can't use that as an
example because it requires this *other* feature that I didn't meantion
yet..."
As I say, Haskell's features are pretty simple, but there's about half a
dozen of them, and they're all inter-related. It makes it really
difficult to figure out where to start.
I don't know if you read it, but I really did think Chapter 1 started
rather well. It's just that Chapter 2 seemed to skip randomly from topic
to topic in an incoherant way.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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I just skimmed it, and it seems very comprehesive.
It doesn't address monads until the half-way point,
and then doesn't dwell on it long, and it has lots of
concrete examples of how to use some of the more
important libraries.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Indeed. I've sat down to write a tutorial myself several times. It
> always seems to degenerate into "oh, wait, I can't use that as an
> example because it requires this *other* feature that I didn't meantion
> yet..."
Recursive tutorial for a recursive language...?
--
All hope abandon, ye who enter messages here.
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
anl
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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> Recursive tutorial for a recursive language...?
LOL! I like it...
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Invisible wrote:
> http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
This book gets stranger and stranger.
It explains how to work the compiler in the middle of a lesson on
writing a simple library. It goes through a lengthy explanation of how
to manually invoke all the compilation states, rather than using the
trivially easy automated compilation system. And it generally seems to
be introducing concepts here, there and everywhere in no coherant order.
Most puzzling. I was hoping for better than this...
[I'm still hoping the chapters on "practical stuff" might actually tell
me something I don't already know - like, for example, how to make
useful libraries actually compile on Windoze...]
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Invisible wrote:
> This book gets stranger and stranger.
>
> It explains how to work the compiler in the middle of a lesson on
> writing a simple library. It goes through a lengthy explanation of how
> to manually invoke all the compilation states, rather than using the
> trivially easy automated compilation system. And it generally seems to
> be introducing concepts here, there and everywhere in no coherant order.
Impressive. It spends a whole chapter showing you how to develop a
library, how to compile it the hard way, and how to construct a Cabal
package from it - but it *doesn't* mention how to upload this package
onto Hackage, the central Haskell online package database. What's some
omission, eh? (I mean, *why* would you bother to package something for
distribution other than to distribute it??)
It also fails to mention the easy compilation method anywhere. Genius.
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